To instill that philosophy in her students, Kelley has incorporated field work into a course she initially found "too theoretical." Last fall, for example, five of her students worked with Humboldt Park’s Family Learning Center (FLC) to assess ways to better serve the needs of the center’s students. Housed in the Puerto Rican Cultural Center, FLC helps young parents pursue high school diplomas and other educational opportunities.

Kelley first approached the center and talked with director Carmen Abrego, explaining the concept of the class and how the student project would unfold in a mutually beneficial and respectful manner. After Abrego agreed to the project, the students—Emily Anderson, Verónica Aranda, Susan Kim, Rita Ruhter, and Jeannie Wakamatsu—met with her to get her guidance and ideas. The experience, they agree, was enlightening and useful.

Abrego and the SPH students then identified a range of issues for potential exploration, finally deciding to evaluate the impact of health education on the lives of FLC students and alumni. To develop an appropriate and useful assessment survey, the students first scoured the literature for background and then sat in on one of the FLC’s weekly health classes, studied the class syllabus, and read exit interviews completed by FLC’s 1998 graduating class.

The survey draft was reviewed by Abrego to ensure that information it elicited would be pertinent and valuable to the FLC. Cultural sensitivity is key to successful data collection, so Abrego also considered the survey for its acceptability to the respondents. At her suggestion, the SPH students conducted a discussion group about the survey with FLC students.

"I like to learn in the field," says Aranda, a Chicago native from the largely Mexican-American Little Village community. "Sitting in a lecture hall listening to a professor gives you the concepts but until you apply those concepts, you don’t really know what the field is all about. If you’re in public health, for one thing, you need social skills. This experience made it real for me."

Adds Ruhter, "It was so important to get out into the community and interact with these young women because they were able to tell us their reality, and you can’t even begin to grasp that through a lecture. We know how to capture data, but we need to make it real for them. When we interact like that with them, they have ownership of the project. They are able to affect their own health care and access to the health care system."

"When students go out there and experience successful collaboration," Kelley observes, "we can be a little more confident about the product—the MPH graduate—that the School of Public Health is sending out to Chicago and the world. Hopefully, the graduates will also feel better equipped."

"UIC was very welcome," Abrego says. "Our students felt very comfortable with [Kelley and her students]. They were very respectful. They understood that they were the visitors. I think this concept can work everywhere when someone like Michele Kelley is involved. She is the right person because she listens. She asks permission, and that is so important."

Abrego says she was impressed with the UIC students’ identification of depression as a concern faced by the FLC students. That "red flag," Abrego says, has provided the impetus to incorporate more mental health content into the FLC health education curriculum.

The students’ assessment survey also gave Abrego valuable insight into her own role as teacher, mentor, and administrator. A noted poet and writer, Abrego readily acknowledges she is learning on the job: "I’m new at being a program director, yet I learned that our students feel comfortable with me, that I am not judgmental with them. I had often wondered whether they were relating to me."

Kelley observes that the incorporation of field-based learning into traditional, classroom-based courses is a growing trend in schools of public health across the country. "We are fortunate that our dean [Susan Scrimshaw] is supportive of these teaching methods, because they are more labor intensive," Kelley notes. "We consider this collaborative teaching, or co-mentoring," she adds. "The community imparts knowledge to us while we attempt to assist community members with some methods and skills because the community has some very pressing informational needs. Community agencies are constantly being asked to provide outcomes these days to justify funding for their programs. We’re trying to develop and hone methods to meet this need that are user friendly and relevant."

Kelley adds, "Field-based learning, to me, is an extension of what is similarly popular in other areas of graduate education—problem-based learning. In business school, you’re given a case study in which you are presented a problem for company X, but in this class, we’re dealing with a real, live community, and we need to be very careful that we are prepared."

Other projects for the class were provided by the Chicago Department of Public Health, with Dr. Shirley Fleming, deputy commissioner for public health services, and the Cook County Department of Public Health, with Valerie Webb, assistant health officer.

Contributed by Rick Asa

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